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The Heart of Darkness is an excellent book and one that I cannot recommend enough. Conrad is a brilliant author, and it shows in this work.

A word of warning to the socially conscious – this book will make you uncomfortable. It includes some racist imagery, and it presents a very unkind picture of the Ivory trade, even as the central characters are participants in what takes place. I won’t go into much else. Some very brilliant dissertations and rebuttals have already been made about the racism in the Heart of Darkness and they are worth reading to understand how different people receive the work.

What makes this book brilliant is how Darkness and Fear are built up and played with. Reading this book will leave you haunted, not just by the mistreatment of Africans in the ivory trade, but in how all of the elements come together to affect our narrator, his companions, and Kurtz himself.

This is a must read for any aspiring writer. I highly recommend it for those who write in the paranormal genre. Though paranormal elements in this book are more with superstition than presentation, it does show you how those elements, real or imagined, can shape the minds of those they affect. That lesson is excellent if you want to add realism and darkness to your paranormal work.

I’m working on the next Caltrop article. It will probably be my wrap-up of the series, at least until I decide that there’s something else I need to discuss.

I just put up the latest podcast of Bay Side Stories. I meet a sensitive subject head-on.

And I have set up a couple of author pages on Amazon. There’s my page as Lynn Perretta, which features my current work. I also have my page as Lynn Davis (from before I was married), which is the name under which I wrote for White Wolf Games’ Mage: the Ascension (Revised).

This is really meta because this post is going to show up on those author pages. Check it out and see.